Assessment of Personal Rapid Transit System Configurations Regarding Efficiency and Service Quality

In order to transform cities into more liveable, safe, and sustainable places, we must shift our mobility paradigms. As one auspicious concept amongst novel intelligent transportation systems, personal rapid transit (PRT) disaggregates urban transportation into small, electric vessels that are centrally operated on dedicated infrastructure, yielding the potential to make public transit more convenient, affordable, and sustainable all at once. In light of this, we examined the potential performance of PRT in a medium-sized German city. Utilizing the traffic simulator SUMO, as well as a specifically developed open source mobility scenario consisting of infrastructure and travel demand, we assessed the level of service and efficiency. We found that a fleet of 30 vehicles can serve the mobility demand of the chosen city while passenger waiting times are guaranteed to stay below three minutes. Vehicle occupancies can be doubled when coordinating vehicles between stations instead of letting them idle randomly. Furthermore, our results show that different combinations of system designs and operating strategies succeed in meeting typical performance requirements—for instance, an operating strategy where unoccupied vehicles idle randomly can effectively compensate for a reduced fleetsize. Depending on the preliminaries of specific cities, such as the availability of space, travel behavior, political background, or acceptable investment and operational costs, a matching transportation system can be designed around the quantitative findings obtained in this study.